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What would you recommend as a "social democrats first taste of socialism" book? (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2037384

A social democrat friend who knows basically nothing about socialism and was a berniecrat is looking for book recommendations, what is a good book to recommend to him?

I sort of dived in the deep end when I first started (perhaps unproductively ) and I they're the type of person who would probably benefit a lot from nice prose and nothing SUPER heavy, but I also know a lot of intro books are full of BS that needs to be deprogrammed later(especially stuff that includes left-anticommunism) so I'm being cautious.

What would you recommend?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Blackshirts & Reds

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

chapter 3 has a fair chunk of anti-communism in it, and while the book is a really good polemic I feel like it isn't a really good FAQ for new socialists

from chapter 3, page 45-46

Those of us who refuse to join the the Soviet Bashing were branded by left-anticommunists as "Soviet Apologists" and "Stalinists," even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Considering the tremendous amounts of necessary mythbusting the rest of the book does that can be excused. It is an excellent book to the dispel the mythology that liberals and social democrats have unwittingly imbibed just by being born and raised in a western society.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

That's fair.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

I don't think you're gonna get libs on board with "actually Stalin was cool" materials they've gotta radicalize a bit first